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Library Reviews

GOODNIGHT TOKYO

IT WAS 1:00 AM IN TOKYO… the night is sublime and so is the dramatic irony.

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Light reading featuring a diverse cast of late night citizens. There is Mitsuki, the tv studio worker who is often tasked with provisioning outlandish, hard to find props at short notice. Kanako, the call centre worker who also leads a seasonal double life pilfering rare street fruits. A cohort of ladies who shuttered their old stalls and banded together to open an all night diner. A lot of fun lies in discovering or predicting the way the characters intersect. Each are mostly only a degree of separation from one another. That degree often being the level headed taxi driver, Matsui.

One of the cover testimonials calls out Murakami. It’s unclear which one but Goodnight Tokyo isn’t really like Haruki Murakami’s prevalent enchanted reality. It’s certainly nothing as surreal as After Dark nor pruriently twisted like Ryu Murakami’s In the Miso Soup. There is comedy, drama, romance and variety. Author Atsushiro Yoshida himself notes that he hopes his serial short stories that can be enjoyed as ten books in one.

TATAMI TIME MACHINE BLUES

The ridiculous students of the college dorm from Tatami Galaxy are back and this time they have found a time machine.

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To recap, The Tatami Galaxy was Tomihiko Morimi’s break out hit about a frustrated male student pining at his lack of the rosy college lifestyle he envisioned. His unhappy circumstances cause him to wonder what could have been. Cue a reboot and we catch up with the protagonist as if he had chosen a different club to join at the start of college.

The Tatami Time Machine Blues features the same lovable oddballs established in our hero’s first outing but here they stumble on a time machine. Before long, they decide its best use will be to aid in the retrieval of a working remote for their antique air conditioner. They spend the rest of the novel trying to undo the damage they accidentally caused while invariably then breaking something else.

Both stories have been adapted into anime series. The first was by Masaaki Yuasa featuring his signature unconventional art style. Yuasa also directed the animated film of Morimi’s 2006 novel The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. The plot of Tatami Time Machine Blues may be familiar to some as it is a remake of the 2005 live action comedy movie Summer Time Machine Blues.

THE FULL MOON COFFEE SHOP

A whimsical and contemplative story about an enchanted cafe, deeply steeped in astrology.

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Muzuki is burned out and bemused at the doldrums that her life has descended to. Now forty something, she writes the storylines for side characters in dating sims. A far cry from her halcyon days as a scriptwriting ace famed for the hit TV series that flowed from her keyboard.

The Full Moon Coffee Shop is printed in conspicuously large font, generously spaced lines and with astrological diagrams. It features several related stories whose main characters have hit a wall. They inhabit the same orbit in Kyoto and share a connection, the full extent of which, not all of them are aware of. Assisting them is a magical cafe that only appears on the night of a full moon and uses the wisdom of the zodiac to help them navigate their choices.

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